Each October, New York celebrates unearthly apparitions and spooky spirits with its delightfully debauched Village Halloween Parade. This year, parade organizers are adding heart to the haunting, inviting Didier Civil, a renowned mask maker from tragedy-stricken Haiti, to serve as the parade’s guest artist. For the past several weeks, he has encamped in Rokeby, NY, designing phantasmic floats, costumes and papier-maché figures in celebration of life beyond death — and in tribute to his homeland.

“We had to figure out a way to help Haitian artists,” explains Jeanne Fleming, the parade’s artistic director. In February, she tracked down Civil, who’s been lauded for his visionary and macabre Carnival creations in Haiti. But after January’s devastating earthquake, “Carnival was canceled and there are no tourists, so his entire livelihood was wiped out,” she says. “His family is living in a tent.”

Fleming wrote letters to various dignitaries to secure his visa and, by September, he was living with parade organizers, painting in their upstate workshop near Rhinebeck.

Despite the horrors his country continues to face — Civil lost countless friends in the earthquake and now fears for his family as food shortages and a cholera outbreak unfold — the 37-year-old still manages a warm grin and professes faith in his art and the parade’s theme of Memento Mori, reminders of death.

“It lets you know where you come from,” he explains through a French translator. “This connection is what keeps you strong at times when you are weak. In Haiti we have an expression, ‘Union fait la force’ — when people can stand together, it keeps them strong.”

Two of Civil’s grandly ghoulish creations for today’s Halloween parade are larger-than-life figures depicting Haitian voodoo chiefs Baron Samedi and Grann Brigitte. This husband-and-wife skeleton team are known as rulers of the Haitian Shadowlands, mischief-makers who relish naughty jokes and outlandish antics. Civil’s mask-making talents are on vivid display in the spouses’ haunting eyes and haggard brows.

The pair will be accompanied by galloping “Night-Mare” horses, ambling 12-foot-tall skeletons and a menagerie of Day of the Dead characters from around the world, all masquerading through the Village. Civil explains that like Halloween in the United States, All Saints’ Day on Nov. 1 and All Souls’ Day on Nov. 2 in Haiti are set aside for embracing spirits of the dead. He says that the holidays this year may be exceedingly difficult for Haitians, because “this will remind them in a new and very deep way of the tragedy.”

Still, he speaks of the resilience of his country, even as misfortune reigns.

“When Haitian people have someone die, they cannot see the people anymore, but they still connect with him or her in their minds and heart,” he says. “Sometimes the people who die can be a protector for the family, let you know something in advance, predict the future or give advice.”

For now, Civil is adding vivacity and rebirth to New York’s rich Halloween traditions. “He’s a very special person,” notes parade organizer Fleming, who has anointed this year’s reimagined parade with a Latin adage in his honor: Vita brevis, ars longa.